Resilience markers for safer systems and organisations

If computer systems are to be designed to foster resilient performance it is important to be able to identify contributors to resilience. The emerging practice of Resilience Engineering has identified that people are still a primary source of resilience, and that the design of distributed systems should provide ways of helping people and organisations to cope with complexity. Although resilience has been identified as a desired property, researchers and practitioners do not have a clear understanding of what manifestations of resilience look like. This paper discusses some examples of strategies that people can adopt that improve the resilience of a system. Critically, analysis reveals that the generation of these strategies is only possible if the system facilitates them. As an example, this paper discusses practices, such as reflection, that are known to encourage resilient behavior in people. Reflection allows systems to better prepare for oncoming demands. We show that contributors to the practice of reflection manifest themselves at different levels of abstraction: from individual strategies to practices in, for example, control room environments. The analysis of interaction at these levels enables resilient properties of a system to be ‘seen’, so that systems can be designed to explicitly support them. We then present an analysis of resilience at an organisational level within the nuclear domain. This highlights some of the challenges facing the Resilience Engineering approach and the need for using a collective language to articulate knowledge of resilient practices across domains

A psychological framework to enable effective cognitive processing in the design of emergency management information systems

Human cognitive processing and decision making are essential aspects in emergency management. Emergency situations imply additional demands to information processing. To meaningfully support decision makers in emergencies, a comprehensive understanding of the human perception and decision making processes and their underlying principles is required in the design of Emergency Management Information Systems (EMIS).This paper presents a psychological framework that models the stages and components of decision making in the context of emergency management. To this end, psychological research on human perception and information processing, knowledge and competence modelling, human judgement and decision making, individual and situational factors, stress, and self-regulation are identified as important compents of the framework. The psychological framework represents a comprehensive model of decision making of emergency managers, for a better understanding of the involved cognitive processes and influencing factors on the person level and on the context level. The paper posits the framework as a guide in the identification of requirements for emergency managers during systems analysis. This comprises systematically describing decision tasks in emergency situations and identifying needs for supporting them. The knowledge on human perception and decision making represented by the framework can also be used to inform the user interface design of the EMIS. It may also inform the evaluation of EMIS as it provides a theoretically founded representation of relevant aspects of human-computer interaction, which facilitates the identification of success indciators to be addressed in user-centred evaluation. The framework furthermore supports the design and implementation of training programmes through the differentiation and modelling of knowledge and competence relevant in emergency decision making. To demonstrate the application of the psychological framework in the design, development, and testing of EMIS a set of concrete design principles as well as exemplary paper prototypes applying these principles are presented

Risk and Protective Factors Associated with Psychosocial Functioning in 911 Operators and Dispatchers

911 operators and dispatchers are considered the true “first responders” to life-threatening emergencies. Their responsibilities include responding to individuals in crisis, deciding appropriate emergency responses, gathering vital information, offering emergency instruction, and providing detailed updates about the response to callers and emergency workers. This high rate of exposure to traumatizing events enhances the risk for pathology, including posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and depressive symptoms. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between social supports, coping style, and sleep as it relates to PTSS and depressive symptoms in 911 operators and dispatchers. Multiple linear regression models were computed to assess the effects of social support, coping style, and sleep on PTSS and depressive symptoms on operators. Participants completed online questionnaires; sample size varied as not every participant completed every measure. The Social Provisions Scale (SPS) assessed social support received (N = 140); the Coping Strategies Inventory Short-Form (CSI-SF) assessed type of coping style (N = 142); and the Pittsburg Quality of Sleep Index (PSQI) assessed quality of sleep (N = 127). Participants completed the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for the DSM-5 (PCL-5; N = 133) and the Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-9; N = 131) to assess PTSS and depressive symptoms. Results found social support predicted lower PTSS and depressive symptoms; greater emotion-focused disengagement strategies predicted lower PTSS depressive symptoms; and poor sleep quality predicted higher PTSS and depressive symptoms. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed

A cognitive architecture for emergency response

Plan recognition, cognitive workload estimation and human assistance have been extensively studied in the AI and human factors communities, resulting in many techniques being applied to domains of various levels of realism. These techniques have seldom been integrated and evaluated as complete systems. In this paper, we report on the development of an assistant agent architecture that integrates plan recognition, current and future user information needs, workload estimation and adaptive information presentation to aid an emergency response manager in making high quality decisions under time stress, while avoiding cognitive overload. We describe the main components of a full implementation of this architecture as well as a simulation developed to evaluate the system. Our evaluation consists of simulating various possible executions of the emergency response plans used in the real world and measuring the expected time taken by an unaided human user, as well as one that receives information assistance from our system. In the experimental condition of agent assistance, we also examine the effects of different error rates in the agent's estimation of user's stat or information needs

Creating a Culture of Courage: A Behavioral Health Study of Resilience and Response to Traumatic Events for Firefighters

Firefighters experience a variety of challenging situations and traumatic events while performing necessary job duties as public servants, which can create behavioral health concerns and even suicide ideation. The purpose of this study is to recognize how individual resilience relates to lived experiences for firefighters who may need next-level behavioral healthcare, which in turn, will identify higher “at risk” firefighters with suicide ideation who need increased mental and emotional care outside of peer interventions. The fundamental question centers on what role does individual resilience, as well as formal and informal resources of behavioral health support, play in mitigating the impact of traumatic events? This study utilized qualitative research, specifically Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, to identify how firefighters make meaning of resilience as it relates to lived experiences associated as a firefighter. Through direct observation interviews, analysis of the recorded data, descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual coding associations, and data-driven results, firefighters will provide the essence of their experiences in relation to individual resilience, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and suicide ideation while filling gaps in already conducted research within the fire service. Six themes emerged that will foster cultural change for firefighter behavioral health initiatives such as a tiered support plan, educative initiatives, intentional leadership actions, communicative resources, normalizing the symptomatic response as much as the event, and the need for a caring community for firefighters. Limitations of research design entail time constraints for a longitudinal study

Organizations under Large Uncertainty: An Analysis of the Fukushima Catastrophe

This paper analyzes the impacts of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which were amplified by a failure of coordination across the plant, corporate, industrial, and regulatory levels, resulting in a nuclear catastrophe comparable in cost to Chernobyl. It derives generic lessons for industrial structure and regulatory frame for the electric power industry by identifying the two shortcomings of a horizontal coordination mechanism: instability under large shocks and the lack of defense in depth.The suggested policy response is to harness the power of Òopen-interface-rule-based modularity by creating an independent nuclear safety commission and an independent system operator owning the transmission grid module in Japan. We propose a transitory price mechanism that can restrain price volatility while providing investment incentives.horizontal coordination, modularity, nuclear power, regional monopoly, electricity regulation, safety regulation, public ownership, independent system operator

Coordination Under Uncertain Conditions: An Analysis of the Fukushima Catastrophe

This paper analyzes the impacts of the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which were amplified by a failure of coordination across the plant, corporate, industrial, and regulatory levels, resulting in a nuclear catastrophe, comparable in cost to Chernobyl. It derives generic lessons for industrial structure and regulatory frame of the electric power industry by identifying the two shortcomings of a horizontal coordination mechanism: instability under large shock and the lack of “defense in depth.”fukushima catastrophe; nuclear power; earthquake and tsunami

Classification and reduction of pilot error

Human error is a primary or contributing factor in about two-thirds of commercial aviation accidents worldwide. With the ultimate goal of reducing pilot error accidents, this contract effort is aimed at understanding the factors underlying error events and reducing the probability of certain types of errors by modifying underlying factors such as flight deck design and procedures. A review of the literature relevant to error classification was conducted. Classification includes categorizing types of errors, the information processing mechanisms and factors underlying them, and identifying factor-mechanism-error relationships. The classification scheme developed by Jens Rasmussen was adopted because it provided a comprehensive yet basic error classification shell or structure that could easily accommodate addition of details on domain-specific factors. For these purposes, factors specific to the aviation environment were incorporated. Hypotheses concerning the relationship of a small number of underlying factors, information processing mechanisms, and error types types identified in the classification scheme were formulated. ASRS data were reviewed and a simulation experiment was performed to evaluate and quantify the hypotheses

Risky Decisions and Decision Support - Does Stress Make a Difference?

Studies of human decision making have demonstrated that stress exacerbates risk taking. Since all decisions involve some element of risk, stress has critical impact on decision quality. Decisions are found to improve with stress up to an optimal threshold beyond which deterioration is observed. However, few studies have examined the psychological experiences underlying risk-taking behavior in conjunction with stress creators. In this paper we propose a research framework that integrates pre-conditions of stress (perceptions of high gain/loss, risk, complexity, and organizational pressure) with observed psychological experiences (time pressure, uncertainty, information overload, and dynamism) that potentially result in risky decision making. This framework suggests that decision support systems have the potential of mitigating or enhancing the psychological perceptions of stress and, hence, impacting decision quality. Empirical testing of a component of this framework provided interesting preliminary results. Subjects experiencing high stress indicated the same levels of perceived uncertainty and dynamism as subjects exposed to low stress, suggesting that use of a decision support system mitigated the perceptions of dynamism and uncertainty for the high stress group. Contrary to hypotheses, the use of a decision support system did not mitigate perceptions of information overload